1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for switching variable-length data packets of a heterogeneous network and a method for the same; and, more particularly, to a switching of variable-length data packets of a heterogeneous network through a serial communication between switching chips to switch the packets with a switching interface module having a network value representing a type of a specific network and a port number of a port which is connected to itself.
2. Background of the Related Art
These days, various kinds of network protocols such as Ethernet, wireless LAN, IEEE1394, PLC, ZigBee, UWB, Bluetooth, etc. are in use as a home network environment, and from now on, new network technology will be used as a new home network environment.
In these environments, a home gateway needs a data switching for mutual data communication between heterogeneous networks as well as the home gateway is able to accommodate various kinds of networks. Also, as home entertainment, audio, video, broadcasting and communication are merged in a home network service, a high speed data processing and a high speed switching method are needed.
Therefore, a switching method for switching data of heterogeneous network which is applicable to the home gateway for the home network environment and service and a for the chip structure based on the switching method are required to be developed.
In case of the home gateway in the prior art, the switching technique using an Ethernet switching chip or an IP switching chip and the data switching method using the PCI bus based on PC have been mainly used.
First, the switching technique using an Ethernet switching chip is mainly used in realizing the home gateway based on Ethernet as a switching method using an address of Data Link Layer which is the Layer 2 in the OSI-7 hierarchy structure by L2 switching method.
In case of another prior art, in realizing the home gateway using an Ethernet switching chip, Ethernet addresses are assigned to each network interface and the Ethernet header is encapsulated to the heterogeneous network data incoming to the home gateway, so the Ethernet data seems to be switched inside of the home gateway.
And the switching technique using the IP switching chip is similar to the Ethernet switching technique; however, as it is a method for switching the input data inputted to the home gateway by using the IP address as a Layer 3 address, the method is frequently used in home gateway for the IP service only, such as Internet.
A data switching method using a PCI bus is commonly used as a data transmitting method using a BUS, rather than as a switching method.
However, as the switching technique using an Ethernet switching chip and an IP switching chip is mainly used for the IP based services in the home network environment, it is not suitable to accommodate various network protocols.
Also, in processing input data into the switching chip, as data is processed (in case the input data size into the switching chip is smaller than the packet unit size which the switching chip processes, null data padding is performed) into a specific bite size (the maximum Ethernet packet size or IP packet size), the memory resources inside of the switching chip is used inefficiently as well as extra data processing time are needed. The reason for the above process is the difficulty in memory management in data writing and reading of the variable-length data packet inside of the switching chip.
Due to reasons mentioned above, in the home network environment where various network protocols exists as the address structures in use are different from protocol to protocol as well as the data length is variable, it is difficult to apply to the home gateway using the existing switching chip.